"Why Man Creates" is an American 25-minute short film from 1968, so this one has its 50th anniversary this year actually and it is the film that made writer and director Saul Bass not just an Oscar nominee, but an Oscar winner right away. It stayed the only Oscar of his career, a career that started with working in minor positions on several Hitchcock films. I still am not too happy with this huge win here as honestly it was partially witty, but never really a funny or entertaining or interesting watch. At least it did not win in an animated category, but documentary short as honestly the animated sequences are really really rare in here. It is a very fast film indeed, maybe too fast for its own good even and maybe they tried to include too much in here as the transitions are not exactly smooth on quite a few occasions. Overall, I think Bass has done better in a few other films he worked on, so it's not too great that this here may be one that most people will remember him for. I myself thing the mediocre and forgettable parts are far more frequent in here than real creativity, so don't watch it unless you are an Oscar completionist or so, but even then this one should be at the bottom quarter of your list. Not recommended.

Saul Bass was best known as one of Hollywood's leading graphic designers. He designed the opening sequences of several notable movies - among them "Vertigo" and "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" - as well as posters for some of the most famous movies (among them "The Shining"). But with "Why Man Creates" he turned to directing. This Oscar-winning documentary short comically looks at the creative process. It mixes animation and live action. The live action segments mix humor with serious discussions about world hunger.

It's an impressive piece of work. Like Stanley Kubrick's "2001" released the same year, it poses the question of humanity's place in the universe. I understand that an uncredited George Lucas was the second-unit cameraman. Not a great documentary, but worth seeing.

This short won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Subject. There will be spoilers ahead:

Saul Bass is best known for his inventive and memorable opening and closing credit sequences for films such as Anatomy of a Murder, Psycho, Vertigo and Around the World In Eighty Days. This is a short film using a mix of animation and live action which proves both amusing and thought-provoking.

It starts with a five minute animated sequence starting with prehistoric hunters and traveling on up through time to the present (1968). It references major events/eras such as the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, the various scientific discoveries (and the orthodoxy's attempts to squelch them) figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Lincoln, the Wright Brothers and so on. These are occasionally out of sequence. This segment is almost worth the price of admission itself.

The varied segments are all introduced, as the film itself is begun: a hand writing with a pencil puts down a heading, much as you would find on an outline. While the sections are mostly unconnected, there are a couple which are directly related. Most of these are best viewed without too much information, so I'll avoid spoiling them here. Portions of this are essentially blackout comedy sketches.

Ultimately, the whole seemingly unrelated short more or less comes together with the last part, which asks the question, "Why does man create?", to which the answer is rather obvious.

This short deserves to be much more widely available and better known. Most highly recommended.